COIF Proposal to Collaboration Circle – Date: 7 June 2025

Aim:
To agree on a robust mechanism which will ensure the safeguarding of historical records across all aspects of our community.

Background:
In the last 15+ years more and more of the history of our community is exclusively in digital form. The last paper copy ‘journalistic endeavours’ to inform the world about what’s going on here ceased in 2008 when Network News stopped being printed.

Since then, information is being held on a variety of organisational websites which don’t have the preservation of the historical record in mind but focus on current affairs and relevance to the organisation.

Thus a lot of essential historical material has likely been lost: most dramatically through the FF website changes in 2021, 2023 and now in 2025, but also records from other organisations, either those that have wound up, or changed their websites. Also YouTube channel content has been either deleted or unlisted and is therefore no longer easily accessible. Facebook is such a fleeting medium that it cannot be relied on for creating a historical record.

Proposal:

  • We as community organisations agree that preserving a historical record is in the interest of the community, as well as fulfilling aspects of our ‘service to the world’
  • We explore ways that allow organisations to deposit their ‘out-of-date’ material in a way that safeguards it in perpetuity (this includes analogue material (including photographs), media (images, audio and video), digital information from websites, YouTube etc)
  • We find ways to ‘curate’ relevant material to make it available as part of our ‘collective autobiography’ on the COIF website